Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!thad
From: thad@cup.portal.com (Thad P Floryan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Backups
Message-ID: <18827@cup.portal.com>
Date: 26 May 89 07:52:37 GMT
References: <9409@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 30

Re: Tom the Rok's backup dilemma ...

I regularly do several things whose requirements are similar to Tom's, and my
solutions are:

1) compress the files (Lempel-Ziv) on the Amiga (forming those files with the
   .Z suffix) and Ymodem-BATCH the whole bundle over to a UNIX system; I move
   multi-megabytes this way between my "site" and the friendly neighborhood
   FTP machine.

2) get a tape drive for you Amiga's SCSI bus, start the backup, and go to
   sleep.  What I use is a Fujitsu M2451A drive with M1008A controller; this
   baby uses the 190MB ANSI 1/2" tape cartridges. In fact, you SAW this unit
   when I demo'd it at BADGE last year (you were right there in the front row
   while I was "on stage" sweating under the lights, trying to stay awake after
   only 1 hour sleep the night before because it took me 4 hours to drill the
   damned holes in the box for the tape drive mounting because I didn't realize
   I was operating the drill motor in reverse! :-)

   I haven't yet written a proper driver for this beast, but I mount it as if
   it were a disk drive and just write bits to it (the tape unit doesn't care!)
   Have to do a manual rewind (e.g. push one button), but it takes only 2
   minutes or so.

Another possibility (which I'm still investigating) is adapting a 1/2" 9-track
drive to the Amiga to ease exchange of UNIX tar tapes; why not, I also have a
paper tape unit on the Amiga!  :-)


Thad Floryan [ thad@cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]